I felt instantly closer to him when he told me about this. I saw myself in him, and that invariably makes people closer. But it was more than that. I found myself respecting this boy who had stayed up late to read the same book series he’d already completed. I always like people better when they tell me about their love of reading. I loved Eli better for it, as much as I would like a friend better for it. But he was more than a friend, after all. He was my lover, my—can I say it? yes!—my life partner.
“Now it’s your turn,” he said, nudging my shoulder. “What made you fall in love with literature?”
I had never properly discussed this, even with my favorite English literature teachers. I had always thought it sounded silly, or like I was trying to come across as poetic and profound. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t poetic or profound in the slightest; these were the sort of social fears that made my heart beat like crazy, and made me doubt every move I made when around people. I was the meek woman in class who never raised her hand, let alone shared something intimate about myself that people might laugh at. But I knew Eli wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t hurt me. Something I was starting to see (and it was never clearer than that day in the lush woods, with nature teeming around us, and civilization only evident in the distance sound of cars) was that Eli would never hurt me. Maybe I was overly optimistic, maybe I had unrealistic expectations, but that, I thought, only prove that I really loved him.
“My Dad used to read a lot,” I said. “Before he became super busy at work, he’d read everything, but mostly classics. I’ve actually thought about this question a few times, about why I love reading so much. For the longest time I thought it was just because Dad reads, and that was it. But now I think it’s something else. It might sound silly,” I warned him.
“It won’t,” he said.
“My earliest memory is of holding a book in my hand. I had no idea what it was at the time. All I remember thinking was that it smelled nice. I liked the smell. I don’t even know what the book was, but I held onto it like other kids hold onto their favorite toys. I remember, once, I was crying like crazy. I can’t even remember why. Maybe I’d fallen over or something. Dad reached into his pocket and brought out the book – my book – and gave it to me. I stopped crying. I held it to my face, felt the pages on my skin, smelled it, and stopped crying.”
It felt strange to be telling another person this, but not so strange that I wouldn’t tell him. It was a small thing, perhaps—this story—but it marked a drastic change in how much I was willing to tell someone. Eli had made me open up, and he couldn’t know how much it meant to me.
“That’s incredible,” he said, with no hint of sarcasm in his voice, as I had imagined the listener would respond when I’d thought about telling somebody this story. They would laugh, or call me weird. But Eli only smiled, looked at me with complete trust and openness, and then moved his fingers over my cheek, tickling my skin. “And then what? What happened when you were old enough to learn to read?”
“Oh, it was normal after that,” I said. “I walked into a library, and the smell of books was instantly familiar. I remember Dad kneeling down and telling me: ‘In each one of these is a whole world you can lose yourself in.’ I didn’t believe him at first. I couldn’t believe that in something as simple as paper there could be an entire world. But then I read my first book, and he was proved right. I demolished books on a weekly basis, dragging Dad to the library and then going alone when I was old enough.” I laughed ruefully. “I didn’t have many friends.” I could laugh about it now, but at the time it was horrible. I don’t know if I read so much because nobody liked me, or nobody liked me because I read so much. All I know is that reading made school tolerable.
“Thank God for college,” Eli said, “where reading that much is a bonus.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “That is one benefit of college. All my embarrassing traits became advantages.”
He laughed. It felt good to make him laugh. “What about the future?” he asked. “Do you think about it?”
He was prying into things I usually kept private. He was delving into my deepest desires and hopes, desires and hopes which I had previously been too embarrassed to share with anybody for fear that they would dismiss them as childish. I took a deep breath, preparing myself to share my innermost secrets. “I’d like to have two children,” I said, hardly believing I was saying the words. “A boy and a girl. I hadn’t met anybody who I’d want to have children with, until—” I stopped. I’d been about to say until I met you. But that was too much, too fast. It would scare him. Just because I wanted these things, it didn’t mean that he did, too.